Comment Wouldn't it be nice if we could rate vintages?

Make it so you could rate an individual vintage of a certain beer. I would love to think what people were thinking of the 08 bcbs they opened this month without going through 100 post to get a good idea. Thoughts

So you are saying have multiple entries of the same beer? That would get pretty messy. How about just a box to enter bottle year in the review you're writing and a way to sort by that as a reader? I'm thinking that would be easier to code, heck, they might even already be working on something like that.

I also would be curious about the relevance of a review unless you also took the date of it into consideration. For example, if a beer falls off over time, and you're sorting by vintage and the earlier ones state "it's the best!" and the more recent ones state "it takes like gym socks!". But I guess you can already sort by date.

How about just a box to enter bottle year in the review you're writing and a way to sort by that as a reader?

Click to expand...

I would love this. I've certainly spent time searching through reviews for older vintages, and I get tired of doing control+F for each page of reviews, looking for mentions of "vintage" or "year" or "old"...

wouldn't you call this system messy, say a beer is amazing from 2005-2010, it is rated 99 and everyone loves it. Then ab-inbev buys it and now it is just meh say 88. It would take a whole lot of bad reviews to seriously affect the rating of the beer even though it is different then said 99 beer

wouldn't you call this system messy, say a beer is amazing from 2005-2010, it is rated 99 and everyone loves it. Then ab-inbev buys it and now it is just meh say 88. It would take a whole lot of bad reviews to seriously affect the rating of the beer even though it is different then said 99 beer

Click to expand...

Except that 2005 has likely fallen off to taste like dog crap by now, and having separate vintages encourages reviewing it, so that 2005 class is going to (rightfully) plummet down to an 80. Soon the vintage ratings lose all meaning unless you cross reference by date of review, which makes things even more messy.

Plus, the case you are talking about is quite rare. It happens, but I'm not sure you could find 20 beers that have changed recipes to the point that their rating dropped 10%. If a beer is significantly different enough, breweries typically just label it as a different name - either calling it something different, or explicitly listing the year in the title. In the case of the latter, it gets a new entry on here anyway. (See, Stone Vertical Epic, Alesmith Decadence, Unibroue, and many others).

Having a seperate rating for each vintage and allowing users to add a rating entry at each consumption would give you the data needed to visualize how a beer improves or declines with time. at that point you could have a stock price like graph that would give insight into the best age to consume. Stone found it was 35 days for their Enjoy By IPA. Would the BA community result be similar?

Honestly, I don't see the utility here (and this is coming from a dyed-in-the-wool ticker who's always looking for a "new" tick). There's already a forum dedicated to the cellaring of beer where discussions of vintage and whatnot can be had, and you can always use the Google search function for reviews that specifically (and helpfully) mention vintages.

If memory serves, the discussion is kinda moot, as the Bros. have stated many times their aversion to reviewing "old" beer (regardless of effect of aging). Hell, if vintages are to be reviewed, why not beers from closed breweries (I have a Buckbean Black Noddy on hand, and, if I hadn't already reviewed it, I'd be looking to do so now)? Same basic principle: the beers in question are no longer being brewed and are unlikely (relatively speaking) to be found on shelves, thus making the reviews mostly pointless.

Hell, if vintages are to be reviewed, why not beers from closed breweries (I have a Buckbean Black Noddy on hand, and, if I hadn't already reviewed it, I'd be looking to do so now)? Same basic principle: the beers in question are no longer being brewed and are unlikely (relatively speaking) to be found on shelves, thus making the reviews mostly pointless.

Click to expand...

I guess that is kind of what I was looking for in the beginning. Say you get two of the same vintage of a super limited beer, you drink one then you could hold the other for a few years. In 2016 it would be nice to only see the reviews for the 2012 batch instead of going through the 13,14,15 to find them. I will admit I have never googled to find a vintage review and this may solve the whole problem for me. The whole deal was about wanting to see what thoughts are of an 08 bcbs and 09 bcbs (which are different) are right this month. After doing a bunch of big verticals you see some of these guys wish they would have drank some of the vintages earlier. 06 BBA Speedway stout was just a bit out of prime

I guess that is kind of what I was looking for in the beginning. Say you get two of the same vintage of a super limited beer, you drink one then you could hold the other for a few years. In 2016 it would be nice to only see the reviews for the 2012 batch instead of going through the 13,14,15 to find them. I will admit I have never googled to find a vintage review and this may solve the whole problem for me. The whole deal was about wanting to see what thoughts are of an 08 bcbs and 09 bcbs (which are different) are right this month. After doing a bunch of big verticals you see some of these guys wish they would have drank some of the vintages earlier. 06 BBA Speedway stout was just a bit out of prime

Click to expand...

The cellaring forum is your friend for these matters, probably even more so than reviews as many don't bother reviewing anyway...

Thanks I really haven't been very active in there since I just now hit 50-60 that I am holding, before I was always getting beers for the first time so I just drank them (sadly 6 of the 2012 parabola that I received didn't make it past the 2 month mark so I still have my struggles lol)

I suspect there would not be enough data to enable accurate distinctions, and if anything you would end up with misleading statistically flawed info. There is already the provision to separate certain beers by vintage (by different naming) if they are considered sufficiently distinct.

I suspect there would not be enough data to enable accurate distinctions, and if anything you would end up with misleading statistically flawed info. There is already the provision to separate certain beers by vintage (by different naming) if they are considered sufficiently distinct.

Click to expand...

Already sold on Cellar section, but for sake of argument don't you think there is a distinct difference in the 08 beer being opened in 10 then another difference in same beer opened in 12?

You should be able to just select a drop down or click a button saying it is a vintage and input it's age. So disregard the year produced but include the age. This seems more important than if it was in a bottle or on tap. As an anecdote I had a 10 year old vertical of Bigfoot. The 2002 (10 years old) was a 100 while the 2 y/o was not as good as the fresh.